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Lots of Ice On Mars
Total Recall writes: "The Mars Odyssey spacecraft is finding large
amounts of hydrogen in the southern hemisphere of
Mars. This strongly indicates the presence of
water ice (since H2O is both common and very stable). The data samples about the upper meter or so of the Martian surface. This apparently extends from the south polar cap up to about 60 south latitude. It suggests a permafrost of mixed ice and dirt."
Water is what a colony will need most. If one can get it on-site, it can make huge mass savings on what one must bring in from Earth. That, and the atmosphere (meteor protection, possibility to aerobrake when arriving) might make it easier to have a colony on Mars than on the Moon, even though it's much farther.
It is unlikely that you can find tritium (H3) anywhere, it decays in a few years or decades. Perhaps you mean helium-3, and suppose that we have a He3-powered fusion-drive spaceship?
Anyway, we already have chemical rockets, for which water can be quite interesting (hydrogen-oxygen).
Perhaps. But Mars isn't that small a planet, so mining near-Earth asteroids would probably be cheaper.
Oxygen is a actually a rather good propellant too, _if_ you use nuclear propulsion, which is the only sensible propulsion system for human spaceflight anyway.
The NERVA rocket prototyped in the 1960s would have had enough power to propel a spaceship to mars in a matter of _weeks_, not years.
And the propellent is disjunct from the energy-source in this design, so you can use whatever you happen to find.
So, cudos for NASA to resume research in this directions, and
*/flame
Eat flaming death, No-Nukes_In_Space-Activists!
*/flame
Yes, and with the Fe all over, set up roving factories to scoop up, filter, and create iron ingots. This should cause some greenhouse emissions, I believe, and a number of other gasses, I believe including steam, would help in the creation of an atmosphere.
What would really be interesting, though, would be how the Martian cities are in Cowboy Bebop. Though, I don't think that such a plan is really workable. It would be simpler and less expensive (in terms of more than just money) to terraform the entire planet.
Before Mars is terraformed, however, someone should be sent out to check the Pyramid, ruins, and other features of that area.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Well, liquid water is probably way below the surface if it exists at all. Everything else is probably ice.
Besides that, though, I wouldn't worry too much -- bacteria has to evolve to both take particular advantage of a host and to overcome that host's immune system. Even if you subscribe to the idea that terrestrial life may have traveled to Earth from Mars, chances are that even a Martian "cold" wouldn't be adaptible to modern humanity. There's just to big of an evolutionary gap.
But yeah, I'll admit that I think I'd still take a look under a microscope first if my drinking water hadn't been purified or manufactured.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
One neat thing about the info released today is that it supports what Richard Hoagland has been saying for months. See pictures here and here.
At his website you can find out how this validates the theory that Mars was once the satellite of the planet that formed the asteroid belt when it broke up for unknown reasons. (The pattern of water is indicative of tidal action.)
Oil of Wormwood: because absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
This is actually an exaggeration from hollywood -- the meteors left in our solar system are not large enough to cause a global extinction of a race as tenacious as humans.
Well, that's a relief! Unfortunately, it's complete and utter nonsense. A hit by a somewhat sizeable asteroid or comet would not only wipe out the human race, but probably most lifeforms on earth. Oh, and it's not size that matters, it's kinetic energy, which is 0.5*m*v^2. Dependent on mass (~size), but more on velocity, since that gets squared.
Hypothetical but realistic example: take a (spherical) piece of rock with a radius of 10 km, hitting the earth at 50 km/s. Assuming a density of 4000 kg/m^3, that gives us a mass of 1.68*10^16 kg. The kinetic energy is roughly
2.1*10^25 Joules. That's the equivalent of 4.67 billion megatons of TNT. Or 467,000,000,000 Hiroshima bombs all set off at the same moment.
Can someone do a sanity check on this? It seems shockingly high.
Assumptions:
1 Megaton TNT ~ 4.5*10^15 J
Hiroshima bomb ~ 10 kilotons of TNT
Fact: volume of a sphere is (4/3)*pi*r^3.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
To do the weeks instead of months thing, you need something more exotic again, like an Orion (push the craft along by exploding nuclear weapons behind it), a fusion drive, or maybe a laser-powered light sail (though presumably you need a laser on Mars to slow it down again . . . ).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
When you are growing plants, you need to have nitrogen all around in the soil and air or not much will get produced. Where are we going to be getting this vital chemical for life on other planets? Importing huge tanks of nitrogen from Earth limits the size of our hermetic domes, and greatly increases maintenance costs.
Is there enough nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere or soil, or will we have to import it?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
The good news is that there is only about a one in three billion chance of a rock that size hitting the earth this year. These are long odds - but the chance is not zero.
The really interesting part of this report is in the beginning: "The process continues generating a cascade of protons and neutrons in the upper few meters (yards) of the martian soil." What do they mean by the upper few meters? I would tend to think no more than a dozen, but that's the problem with language like "few". At any rate, this does not preclude the existence of water in the more central latitudes, it only rules out water 'close' to the surface. It's still possible that there are underground aquifers buried beyond the range of the method they used to detect hydrogen. Their own map even supports my theory; there are slightly bluish regions in figure three as far north as the equator (the limit of the map). Since the signal strength is dependent on both the depth and size of the hydrogen sample, this interpretation is highly probable, I think.
This also has interesting consequences on the search for life on Mars: if they want the best odds of finding life, they will need to go to the edge of the region that has the water signals, and dig down until they hit the upper edge of the permafrost. Things like Viking and Sojourner (if it looked for life) only looked at the surface, and didn't have a good idea of where on the surface of the planet to land to look (I'm not sure where they landed, but I'm betting it wasn't outside of the 120 degree belt where the water signals are scarce [assuming the North and South poles are approximately the same]).
I wonder why they didn't publish data for the North polar region? I find it hard to imagine that there was an asymmetry on the planet, or that the probe switched it's instruments off because they were only interested in one pole. I'm not implying that NASA is trying to hide anything, perhaps the data was symmetrical enough that they didn't want to waste their time publishing it on a preliminary report like this one. They may also not be finished crunching the data from the North, which would make this a very preliminary report. I'd still like to see the results for the whole of Mars, though.
The last interesting possibility is that some of their data doesn't point at water at all. They have detected the presence of hydrogen, and water is only the most abundant hydrogen containing compound on Earth. Other chemicals that contain hydrogen that may (this is a big may) be present are: methane (CH4), lipids (too many to list), oil (again, many), ammonia (NH3), carbohydrates (name literally means that it contains carbon and hydrogen, e.g. C6H12O6) etc. What I'm saying is that there may be oil deposits on Mars (very slim chance, but not nonexistent). More likely it's just water and/or ammonia, but all this means is that I'm even more eager to at least send another probe that can test a sample for life and run a spectral analysis on a small core sample (assuming they can get the sample to the surface before it evaporates).
I'd still like to go back to the Moon and get stations established there first (availability year round and shorter distance being two of the main reasons), but I am suddenly a lot more interested in going to Mars, too.
BlackGriffen